On Valentine's Day... And writer's block...

On Valentine's Day... And writer's block...

by Adam Littlefield on Monday, February 14, 2011 at 6:42pm

     Eight years ago today, Valentine's day 2003, I checked in to the hotel at the Davenport River Center. I had no Valentine, I was there to fight in front of hundreds of people. Nearly two years of a quest to get my head outta my ass and develop an active lifestyle was culminating with my crazy decision to box in the Toughman Contest...

     The night of the fight, and the events leading up to it, is the subject of my first official Quincy Fields story. And right now, I am stuck 3500ish words in, trying to decide how deep to delve in to the details of the girl I was getting over at the time...

     I am not sure as to the degree of her relevance to the story. Although this girl is a trusted friend now who I have an amazing, hours-long rant-session with every few months, she is not really a part of my life, and only really became a part of my life at that time out of circumstance. But she was the first girl I ever really had a deep-seated connection with, a connection born of circumstance and intoxication, but raised in a mutual faith in eachother that we were better than the sum of our present actions and respective stations in life. She inspired me to write. She was in love with my typed words, if nothing else, and I was in love with her strength in the face of adversity. It was dysfunctional, as all of my loves have been, but it was also very raw and real, as all of my loves have also been...

     So that is my quandary, I am stuck trying to convey and remember feelings I'm not really sure about any more. And the depth of said feelings, or lack thereof, scares me. As much as I want to just trust whatever my brain gives my fingers and know that it will be good enough, I can't help but worry that I will either cheapen or over-aggrandize sacred things in the halls of my brain.

     How much or little of myself or the people who have meant something to me do I put on the page? That is the quandary in general. I will encounter the same problem when I get back to writing about my months in the jungle and the lovesick months that followed, or my dysfunctional relationship with my father, my mother, my sister... Fuck...

     I choose this, and in the times to come, all of these things will come to pass, for better or worse, cheaply or over-aggrandizingly. Because I am a writer. In the paraphrased words of Hank Moody when asked whether he was an artist or a pretender, " I'm neither, I'm a writer. I think. I drink. I write. Lather, rinse, repeat..." I accept it, and I will  make it work...

     That Valentine's day eight years ago, I had lost nearly two hundred pounds, and had decided months before that I either needed to kick someone's ass, or get my ass kicked... I got my ass kicked; by an ex-marine a little shorter and quite a bit fitter. But I loved every fucking second of it. It was exhilarating... And, like the only real moves I've made in life, it was BIG...

     I think that, that night, I really got over the girl. I found no Valentine. I drank many draft beers as soon as I left the ring, did drugs through a broken nose, and gambled degenerately... Spackle... My many years-long backslide could possibly be attributed to my loss in the ring, but could just as well be attributed my becoming too comfortable with my progress and reverting back to the full-time raging wildman, rather than the occasional raging wildman I had become accustomed to... Either way, that was one of the greatest nights of my life, and it involved no Valentine...

     As for now, I sit here today completely over another girl. She's a girl I can't for certain say I won't have another chapter with, but our lives do not concern eachother in the present. There is a girl I like, but like most every girl I decide I really like and am not just trying to spoon, I fear I have gone way over-the-top with her. There are girls I try to spoon, but not terribly hard... C'est la vie, like I've been saying, all we can do is be honest, and be who we are...

     So, Happy Valentine's Day, people. I treat it with warm indifference, and fond recollections of something I did for me, and no one else... If you hate Valentine's Day, like my video said, do like the rest of us; get drunk, and shut the fuck up...

Good day, you beautiful people...
~Boombalias